Yeah, I don't think it's overblown at all. Perhaps this one individual demonstration is not that big of a deal in a vacuum, but we're collectively in the process of deciding what role AVs will play in our society. There are lots of players who want to use them as a justification for further expanding auto-centric planning, and I really don't like the optics of putting cars on a bike path and future LRT corridor, through a neighborhood that was already brutally divided by interstate planning once.

Last edited by tmart on February 21st, 2018, 2:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

So Hennepin County is interested in autonomous vehicles in a general sense, and MNDOT has this vehicle that they're making available to any local governments to try things out. Hennepin county was involved with the Super Bowl demo, but they just want to test it in some slightly more realistic conditions. The specific model is legal to operate in the US, but each "use" of it on roads requires a federal exemption process that takes 9-10 months. So the county has to test it in a place with no vehicles, hence the Greenway.

They're not testing this as a plan to run a autonomous shuttle on the current Greenway path. If they were to use a technology like this for transit in the Greenway, it would be in the dedicated space on the south side of the Greenway which is already reserved for transit, running in it's own guideway (and a much bigger version of this vehicle, which the manufacturer is apparently working on). But ultimately I think Hennepin County's interest in this lies in connecting suburban transit stations to solve the last mile problem, rather than as a fixed guideway transit in the Greenway.

That's all more or less as I assumed. My question is why can't they shut down a street to do this, rather than shut down one of our few bike/ped facilities.

Maybe that's not good enough for the feds? Possible, but I'm skeptical. Until I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume that the county sees closing the greenway as no big deal, but not so closing a street.

Does the trail have split lanes between Hennepin and Lyndale? IIRC, it's a single path, so not easy to get around the AV. They could've done this just a little bit west where the trail has separate lanes.

Could autonomous vehicles deflate real estate values in 15 years? Seems in less dense cities they will free up lots of parking spaces and also make buildings more affordable because no parking garages, parking lots. That could be a lot of supply on market fairly quickly when autonomous vehicles take off.

I only read half of that article but unless it gets a whole lot smarter in the second half, I'd say it's kind of idiotic. Where exactly do they think all those autonomous cars will go when they're not in use? Or do they expect them to be continually circulating, and see no problem with traffic in that scenario? Also, I'll point out the fallacy in this that implies Americans own private vehicles because they have to - as though somehow, with autonomous cars, nobody will want to own their own private autonomous car. People don't drive because they can't take taxis, buses, or trains; they drive because they don't *have to* take taxis, buses, or trains.

Technologists love to evangelize the autonomous car. They should really talk with some sociologists about how and why our society's notions of independence and personal freedom have been harnessed by an auto industry that realizes they can make more money selling two cars to every household every five years than they could by selling buses and trains. Autonomous cars are a way to avoid changing the paradigm while making personal cars more expensive and possibly safer.

Edit: turns out I was almost done with the article, so I finished it. Nope, it doesn't get any smarter.

It’s a long read. Points: Working Lidar would have seen the pedestrian. Most other companies have two humans. The video shown is nothing like what humans would see or even good visual spectrum recording cameras. The Uber/Waymo lawsuit was over long distance lidar, could be tests around non-lidar systems. Modern cars often have advanced breaking systems that detect imminent crashes and engage to reduce damage but it didn’t happen as if it was disabled.

I had a thought this morning... it's pot hole season. As drivers many of us watch for the BIG ONE and will modify how we drive. Options are usually straddling a pot hole or slightly going over a line. Think we'll see an increase in blown out tires once the driverless cars don't look for pot holes?

I had a thought this morning... it's pot hole season. As drivers many of us watch for the BIG ONE and will modify how we drive. Options are usually straddling a pot hole or slightly going over a line. Think we'll see an increase in blown out tires once the driverless cars don't look for pot holes?

Someone in NYC just told me their Uber car they rode in had some way of detecting and avoiding potholes - assuming its just something in a current car model

I heard Lidar has issues where light and dark shift, like edge of tunnel and its something they have been working on.

And please please, why was the car going 38 mph?!? who designs the car to do that - these are testing phase - they should be going as slow as possible without being hazard to other cars - like say automatically 5 miles under the speed limit on any surface street.

I’m thinking they haven’t solved pavement conditions yet or we’d see them testing these things outside of the desert. But in theory there’s nothing preventing a model from detecting potholes and avoiding them when safe. It’s not a fundamentally different problem from the other vision problems they’ve had to solve.